By: Eli Freund, Editorial Communications Manager, UConn School of Engineering
Following an exponential increase in student enrollment, an investment in entrepreneurship-backed faculty, and an overall investment in new subject areas, the University of Connecticut School of Engineering is proud to announce that 13 new faculty have started in Fall 2021.
These 13 new faculty break down into five new faculty in the Computer Science and Engineering Department, three new faculty in the Biomedical Engineering Department, two new faculty in the Mechanical Engineering Department, two new faculty in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, and one new faculty in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department.
All come with impressive backgrounds and hail from as close as UConn, Cornell, and Georgia Tech for their graduate studies, to as far away as Beihang University in China. With an investment in entrepreneurial backgrounds by the University, others also have experience in start-ups, with some new faculty creating companies in areas like cancer treatment and battling disinformation across the internet.
The thirteen new faculty members are as follows:
Name: Fayekah Assanah
Department: Biomedical Engineering
Title: Assistant Professor in Residence
PhD Institution: University of Connecticut
Research Areas: Synthesis of hydrogels to mimic the mechanical behavior of the brain matter and investigate cellular response to traumatic brain injury.
Name: Burcu Beykal
Department: Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering
Title: Assistant Professor
PhD Institution: Texas A&M University
Research Areas: Process Systems Engineering, Hybrid Modeling, Machine Learning
Name: Leila Daneshmandi
Department: Biomedical Engineering
Title: Assistant Professor in Residence of Innovation and Entrepreneurship
PhD Institution: UConn
Research Areas: Innovation, Entrepreneurship
Name: Shiri Dori-Hacohen
Department: Computer Science & Engineering
Title: Assistant Professor
PhD Institution: University of Massachusetts Amherst
Research Areas: Reducing threats to the information ecosystem online and to improving public discourse from an information retrieval lens, informed by insights from the social sciences.
Name: Monika Filipovska
Department: Civil and Environmental Engineering
Title: Assistant Professor
PhD Institution: Northwestern University
Research Areas: Transportation Network Modeling and Optimization, Traffic Flow Modeling, Simulation and Prediction, Predictive Analytics for Real-Time Intelligent Transportation Systems Operations, Applications of Emerging Technologies, Big Data, and Data Analytics in Transportation
Name: Kyungjin Kim
Department: Mechanical Engineering
Title: Assistant Professor
PhD Institution: Georgia Institute of Technology (PhD in ME, 2018)
Research Areas: Thin films mechanics and encapsulation. Reliability engineering for flexible and implantable electronics.
Name: Lina Kloub
Department: Computer Science and Engineering
Title: Assistant Professor in Residence
PhD Institution: University of Connecticut, 2021
Research Areas: My research interests are in computational biology, bioinformatics, and on developing new computational frameworks to help answer fundamental biological questions.
Name: Brittany Nkounkou
Department: Computer Science and Engineering
Title: Assistant Professor
PhD Institution: Cornell University
Research Areas: Programming Languages, Certified Software
Name: Jacek Ossowski
Department: Computer Science and Engineering
Title: Assistant Professor in Residence
PhD Institution: New York University
Research Areas: Machine Learning, Neural Networks, Reinforcement Learning
Name: Hugo Posada-Quintero
Department: Biomedical Engineering
Title: Assistant Professor
PhD Institution: University of Connecticut
Research Areas: Biomedical signal processing, wearable instrumentation, biomarkers of human emotions, biosensors, biomedical instrumentation
Name: Zongjie Wang
Department: Electrical and Computer Engineering
Title: Assistant Professor
Ph.D. Institution: Cornell University (joint Ph.D. program), Harbin Institute of Technology
Research Areas: Power systems, non-linear optimization and simulation, power market, coordinated transmission, and distribution frameworks.
Name: Wei Zhang
Department: Computer Science and Engineering
Title: Assistant Professor
PhD Institution: George Washington University (in US), Beihang University (in China)
Research Areas: Cloud Computing, Operating System, Distributed System, Network and Storage System, Edge Computing, Machine Learning System, Resource Disaggregation
Name: Shan ”Susan” Zuo
Department: Electrical and Computer Engineering
Title: Assistant Professor
PhD Institution: University of Texas at Arlington
Research Areas: Distributed cooperative control, cyber-physical systems, reinforcement learning, attack-resilient control, microgrids, renewable energy systems
